TPB trial witness: file-sharing not bad for music business

What happens when a professor who believes that file-sharing has been …

The Pirate Bay trial settled into something (sort of) approaching normality today as two professors took the stand. One explained more about how BitTorrent functions; the other got into a fight with prosecutors, suggested that file-sharing wasn't bad for the music business in general and that it has led to a huge transfer of wealth to artists, and sarcastically asked the court to send flowers to his wife.

Up first (and speaking by telephone) was Kristoffer Schollin, a professor at G�teborgs Universitet (Gothenburg University). Schollin's expertise, according to his bio, lies in "Copyright law, Trademark law, Internet Domain Name regulation, Digital Rights Management and Open Source/Free Software dynamics," but he spent much of his testimony describing how BitTorrent functions.

One key point that has now been hashed out in court several times is that it can be quite difficult for average users to know what tracker they are using when downloading from the swarm—even clicking on a .torrent file at The Pirate Bay's website doesn't necessarily mean that The Pirate Bay's own tracker is being used to coordinate the transfers between peers.

Schollin also made clear that the site isn't really a file-hosting service except in the quite narrow sense that it hosts the .torrent files, though he was unwilling to offer an opinion on The Pirate Bay's legality. The conversation also turned to Google, as it has with nearly every witness, with the goal of either articulating/denying a difference between what the two services do. Schollin did indicate that Google could be used to find .torrent files, including those from The Pirate Bay (something that a quick ".torrent coldplay" search will confirm).

"Send some flowers to my wife"

But when Roger Wallis, a songwriter and arts professor at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, took the stand, things got contentious, and fast. Wallis learned that investigators had called his boss at the school, asking about Wallis' work and its quality. "I know I’m supposed to remain calm but this really bothers me. If that’s what happened, I don’t like it,” he said, according to Sweden's The Local newspaper.

A music industry lawyer then questioned Wallis about his qualifications, his title, and his dissertation. The exchange quickly grew acrimonious and, when the judge ordered everyone to take a brief recess to calm down, Wallis said, "What people! God bless Sweden."

When he finally got to the meat of his testimony, Wallis made the case that the music business (that is, the broader worldwide music business that extends far beyond recorded music) had benefited greatly from file-sharing. New artists had gained tremendous exposure, while concert revenues had climbed significantly for many artists. Wallis also said that his research had found that file-sharers did tend to buy more music and other cultural products overall than those who didn't use such services.

Following the testimony, Wallis was asked whether he wanted compensation for his time in court. "You are welcome to send some flowers to my wife," he said, according to TorrentFreak. One wonders how many flowers Mrs. Wallis will actually receive; Twitterers have already started sending pots of them to her home.